


Nightmares

by teamfreewilll



Series: Paper Cranes [3]
Category: Prison Break
Genre: Allusions to Suicide, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, PTSD, Post-Season/Series 05, disorded eating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:33:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26282716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teamfreewilll/pseuds/teamfreewilll
Summary: Michael struggles to adapt to normal life. His family tries to help.
Relationships: Michael Scofield/Sara Tancredi
Series: Paper Cranes [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1894243
Comments: 9
Kudos: 30





	Nightmares

It’s been three weeks since Michael came home, and one week since he stopped looking over his shoulder all the time. In the beginning, he was so terrified that the freedom he had been granted would be torn away from him once more. It had happened seven years ago, on his wedding day no less. He just found it hard to believe that it was truly over. Every morning he woke up, expecting the dream to be over and to be back inside a cramped prison cell in Yemen. Those were on the nights he slept, sometimes he’d sit up all night in the living room, never joining Sara in bed. For the first couple of weeks, his wife would come downstairs and talk to him, try to convince him to come to bed, but it would never work and she would always retreat upstairs alone. For the last few nights, she hadn’t bothered coming to talk to him. 

Michael Scofield prides himself on being able to hold it together. Even when everything is at its worst, and there’s no end in sight, he’s always stayed calm and kept a cool head. The thing was, back when they were trying to get Scylla, and ever since he’d been working for Poseidon, something had always been on the line. He couldn’t have afforded to break down, to be weak, or take his eye off the ball. It had worked too, somehow they had always come out the other side. A little worse for wear, a little scarred, but mostly alive. 

Now that everything’s over, and they’re living a normal life, there’s nothing there for Michael to throw all of his energy into, nothing to stop him from ruminating on what he’s been through. He had been going at 110% for so long, since he had gone into Fox River, he hadn’t really stopped. Life’s slowed right down now, and he doesn’t really know how to adapt to it. Michael can feel everything he’s held in for the past decade rising to the surface. The lives lost in the battle to get his brother's life back. Whip is just the most recent, and therefore the most painful. Michael had dragged him into this whole affair, took him under his wing, and now he was dead because of him. 

He’s trying. He’s trying so hard to just be a good man. A good father, a good husband. If he could just get past the guilt, and the constant feeling of fear. He can’t come to terms with the fact that he’s a free man. Michael’s forgotten how to live a life that isn’t his. He’s no longer following anyone’s orders. He’s directionless. Sara told him that he’d feel better if he got a job, something to occupy his mind, but he’s almost agoraphobic. Scared to let his family out of his sight in case tragedy were to strike. Every morning when Mike gets on the school bus, he’s filled with a sense of dread. He asks-- No, he insists that Sara text him when she’s leaving work on a late shift so he knows to be waiting at the door for her to arrive home. He doesn’t mean to be overprotective and paranoid, he really doesn’t. He’s just so scared to lose everything all over again. Sara, god bless her heart, she doesn’t complain. She doesn’t even force the subject on him, but Michael knows that she’s worried. He knows that she’s spoken to Lincoln about the situation at least twice. 

Tonight is one of the nights where Michael goes to bed with Sara. When he climbs into bed beside her and they shut the lights off, he doesn’t know if he’ll actually sleep or if it will be another night of staring at the ceiling until the sun comes up. He must’ve been exhausted though, because one long blink turns into another, and before he knows he’s drifted off to sleep. It’s when he’s asleep that it’s worse. At least when he’s awake, he can stay in control. When the nightmares come though, he can’t do anything to stop them. 

They’re not nightmares about monsters, about demons, or anything bizarre. Michael’s taunted at night, by dreams of his family. Sara, Mike, and Lincoln. Jacob is usually there too, and he’s taking Mike away. Except in his nightmares, they don’t get him back. In his dreams, all the people that he’s lost over the years come back to haunt him, and they throw accusations and blame in his face. Veronica, Bellick, Whip. They’re all so angry at him, they lob insults at him. The worst ones are the ones where he watches his family die because of a mistake he makes. He screws up and comes back to life too soon, and Poseiden decides to kill them all instead of just throwing them back into jail. He makes Michael watch. He notices every detail when he’s awake, and in his dreams, it’s not much different. Unlike normal dreams where everything is hazy and filtered, Michael sees everything in a horrifying clarity. It’s a dream like that tonight that wakes him up with a gasp. Once he’s awake, he fights to quieten his harsh breaths. Doesn’t want to wake Sara up, because he knows that if she wakes up, then she’ll ask him about it. He won’t burden his wife with that. Not after everything he’s already put her through. 

Michael pushes the blankets out of the way and quietly climbs out of bed, bare feet padding silently against the carpet as he makes his way to the ensuite bathroom. Sara doesn’t shift when he flicks the light on, and he closes the door behind him so that it doesn’t wake her. The harsh lighting makes him look even paler than he already is, and the first thing he notices when he looks in the mirror above the basin is the bags under his eyes. He looks about as bad as he feels. He’s exhausted, even when he does sleep it doesn’t last long. Michael closes his eyes against his reflection, but all that does is make the nightmare flash violently in his mind. Slender fingers grip the porcelain, hard enough that his fingers turn white. He feels a tightening in the back of his throat, clenches his jaw to fight it off, but he knows he’s going to throw up. 

Knees slam against the tile as Michael drops to the floor in front of the toilet, and he’s emptying the meager contents of his stomach into the bowl. It’s mostly acid, and it burns his throat coming up. It hurts, and he wants to call for his wife, wants some kind of comfort. Perfectly timed, the door opens and he hears Sara walking up behind him. He didn’t even have to call out for her because she must be able to sense his pain. Her gentle hand rests between his shoulder blades and rubs gently until he’s finished. He can’t hear her properly over the ringing in his ears, but there’s a soothing timbre to her voice that makes Michael relax slightly. He’s embarrassed to have been caught in this situation, even though Sara has seen him at his very worst. He wants to portray a picture of togetherness, and kneeling on a bathroom floor at 4 am, vomiting into the toilet is about as far away from that as he can get. 

“You’re okay,” Sara whispers when Michael’s finished and he’s pulled away from the toilet to lean against the wall. His eyes are closed, and he’s not ready to open them yet and deal with the questions he knows that Sara is going to ask. He listens to her move around the room, and the sound of the tap running, and then there’s a glass of water being pushed into his hand. Michael opens his eyes then, and he sees concern in her gaze, but she smiles at him, and he tries to smile back. They sit in silence, beside each other on the bathroom floor while Michael sips at the water and Sara rests her hand on the back of his neck and squeezes reassuringly. When the glass is empty, he sets it down beside him and pulls his legs up to his chest. 

“I’m sorry…” Michael sighs, resting his arms on top of his knees He’s curled in on himself, shutting himself off from Sara and the rest of the world. He wishes his head would just shut up, that he had some kind of brain bleach that would help him forget his nightmares. 

“You don’t need to apologize to me, Michael,” Sara replies, moving her hand down his arm and resting it over his clenched fist. “I just wish you’d talk to me about what you went through while you were gone.” Michael thought about the conversation he’d had with Lincoln while they were still in Yemen. 

_You can’t carry the load on your shoulders alone. You need to share the burden._

“I was put into Ogygia, and it was so much worse than anywhere I’d been before. It was… It was worse than hell. The people in there had no morals, they were the worst of the worst. I knew I wouldn’t be safe, so I tried to escape, wanted to get Whip and myself out of there. I had only been there a few days, hadn’t had time to scope the place out, so I just had to kind of… Wing it.” Which was something Michael Scofield never did. He’d always been the man with the plan, but he had been so scared, so desperate, he had been careless, and it almost cost him his life. “As you can imagine, it failed. The guards found me, beat me, and threw me in solitary. I could take the psychical pain, the broken ribs. I didn’t even really feel it.” That was nothing compared to getting your toes sliced off by a mafia don.

“I spent four years in that one cell. At first, I tried to stay positive. I thought of you and Mike a lot, I knew I couldn’t break because I had to get back to you, no matter how long it took.” Michael rubbed his hands together anxiously, looking at the tattoos covering his palms. He couldn’t wait to get them removed, they served as a constant reminder of his past. “I think when it got to six months, that’s when I realized they weren't going to let me out. Michael Scofield disappeared seven years ago, but being in that cell for four years, it was like disappearing all over again. Staring at the same four walls every day, I could feel myself lose it. I started to forget what Mike looked like, I knew he was growing up, and I couldn’t... I couldn’t picture it, you know? The longer I was in there, the more I started to feel things slip away from me. Little things. I just didn’t want to forget everything about you. While I still remembered the sound of your voice in the morning or the feeling of your arms around me, it was like I still had you with me. If I lost that, I’d lose everything.” 

Sara listens silently while Micheal speaks, keeps her hand on his arm and rubs small circles into the skin. She doesn’t try to interrupt, simply lets Michael get out everything that he needs to say. It’s the first time since he got home that he’s spoken about Yemen. 

“I became a person I wasn’t proud of in that prison. Whip said to me… He said he was worried I actually became Kaniel Outis in solitary, and I think maybe a part of me did. A part of me had to, I had to distance myself from Michael Scofield in order to survive. If I thought of myself a separate entity, a whole other person, I could get through it.” Michael let his head fall back against the wall as he continued talking, staring at the tiled wall opposite them. He didn’t want to look at Sara and see the disappointment in her eyes, maybe regret. Michael was a different person now, and maybe if she knew just how different he was, she wouldn’t want him. “It helped, at least for the first two years. I woke up one morning. 763 days in, and I broke. I wanted out. Out of Solitary, out of prison. Out from under Poseidon’s thumb, once and for all.” 

“What happened?” Sara asks gently, trying to encourage him to open up to her completely. Michael was scared though, that their whole relationship might change from this point forward. That his wife would look at him like he was this broken thing when all he really wanted was to push through the trauma and try to come out the other side. He wanted to keep it all inside, pretend he was doing fine. For the sake of his family. God knows it wasn’t a healthy way to live, but did Michael want to risk the alternative? Hell no. Even though he should have known that Sara wouldn’t just up and leave him. If him coming back from the dead hadn’t put her off, then nothing could. 

“All I ever wanted was for my family to be safe. You, Mike, Lincoln. Whatever happened to me while I was gone, it was worth it to give you a life of freedom. After everything you had been through, it was the least you deserved.” Michael spoke with determination. It had been hard, unbearable at times, but because of his sacrifices, Mike grew up safe and happy with his mom and his uncle in his life. 

“What about you, Michael? When do you get to be free? When is it finally over for you?”

Michael couldn’t answer that question. He didn’t know if he would ever truly be free. Poseidon was gone, he was fully exonerated of all crimes. Kaniel Outis was well and truly dead, but that dark pit inside of him, he worried it would live in him forever. 

After a few moments of silence, Sara asks him if he’s ready to go back to bed and he nods somberly. Together they climb to their feet and leave the bathroom. There’s still a lot more conversation to be had, so many words unsaid, but now they can try and get back to sleep. It’s only a few more hours before the sun comes up again, and they need to get up and send make off Mike to school. He’s glad that his son didn’t wake up in the midst of all the commotion, at least. 

“Come here,” Sara says once she’s climbed into bed, opening her arms for him. Michael lets himself be vulnerable and climbs into her embrace. His head rests on her chest and he loses himself in the sound of her heartbeat. Steady and constant, a reminder that she’s here. “I love you. Never forget that, okay?” She whispers into the darkened room and then presses a kiss to the top of his head. Michael lets himself fall asleep with her arms wrapped around him protectively, and he sleeps through the night with no more dreams.

\--

In the morning when he wakes up, Sara is already up and out of bed. Michael takes a second to stretch himself across the crisp white sheets before he pushes himself up. He glances at the clock and he’s surprised to see that he slept right through the alarm and that Mike is probably already at school. His teeth feel fuzzy and he grimaces at the sensation as he climbs out of bed and goes to brush his teeth and get ready for the day. Once he’s feeling fresher, and he’s changed into a navy blue jumper and some jeans, he heads downstairs. It’s Sara’s day off today, which after last night, he’s grateful for. He wants to spend time with her, to try and to prove to her that he can still be a good husband. The sound of his brother's deep voice resonates up the stairs almost as soon as Michael steps out of the bedroom. He hadn’t thought Lincoln was coming round today, not that he minds. He’s always happy to see him, to have him be a part of the family. However, he guesses it’s not just a coincidence that he’s downstairs talking to Sara the morning after Michael’s minor breakdown. They’re probably talking about him. This is only confirmed when Michael walks into the kitchen and sees them both leaned against the counter opposite each other. They’re talking in hushed tones, or about as hushed as a man like Lincoln can get, but as soon as his brother sees him he shuts up and straightens himself out. It’s almost as if they don’t expect him to figure it out straight away like the tension isn’t hanging in the air like a thick curtain. 

“Mornin’.” Lincoln greets him, taking a sip out of a coffee cup that looks tiny in his massive hands. Michael nods back in greeting and moves past them both to grab a mug out of the cupboard. He’s waiting for one of them to bring it up. He can picture them having a silent conversation behind his back, trying to decide which one of them should speak first. Michael decides to make it easier for both of them. 

“So, I guess Sara told you about last night.” He starts, grabbing the still fresh coffee from the maker and pouring himself a cup. It’s like back at the warehouse all over again, when Michael started having nosebleeds and wanted to keep it from Sara. Of course, Lincoln has gone ahead and told her anyway. He’d noticed how much closer the two of them had become in his absence, supporting each other through their grief. He couldn’t blame them, but he felt a stab of jealousy in his gut. Like he was an outsider looking in. 

“Of course she did. She’s worried about you.” Lincoln shrugs one shoulder, before placing his mug down on the counter. 

“You don’t have to be. Either of you.” Michael’s still talking with his back to them, stirring sugar and creamer into his coffee. If he doesn’t look at them, then he doesn’t have to deal with the two people he loves most in the world looking at him as he’s about to fall to pieces. “I’m fine. I’m dealing with it.”

“Yeah, waking up and puking your guts out at four in the morning when you’ve had nothing to eat all day really sounds like dealing with it.” His brother’s tone is harsh, but he doesn’t mean to be. He just wants to get through Michael’s tough exterior. “You know you can’t just survive on coffee, right?” 

Michael almost wants to roll his eyes but suppresses the urge. Sometimes he forgets to eat, and at dinner time when Mike and Sara are at the table, he’ll push the food around the plate for a half hour and then scrape it into the trash. Food just… Doesn’t appeal to him anymore. After all those years of bread, rice, and water, the textures and scents of the meals he tries to eat can be overwhelming. They sit heavy on his stomach and make him feel nauseous. But it’s not a problem, not really. He gets down a couple of slices of toast and butter in the morning, and he doesn’t really notice if he’s hungry anymore. 

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Linc.” He turns around with a sigh and his brother is looking at him, and Sara is looking at his brother. He’s trying, he’s not sure what else he can give them. He just knows he hates the way Lincoln is looking at him. It’s why he didn’t want to say anything at all. 

“Well, we think that you’d benefit from talking to someone.” It’s Sara’s turn to talk this time, and Michael hides behind his cup of coffee. It’s lukewarm, but sipping from it means he doesn't have to look at his brother or his wife, so he keeps drinking. 

“You won’t talk to me or Sara about what happened, out of some stupid sense of pride, or whatever. If you won’t talk to us maybe you’ll talk to someone qualified to deal with this kind of stuff.” Lincoln moves to one side of Michael and leans against the counter, folding his arms across his broad chest. 

“I appreciate the concern, but no. I don’t want to-- Uh, I don’t need to do that.” He responds with a small shake of his head. Michael gets the sense that he’s being closed in, his brother on one side of him and his wife in front of him. They’re going to talk about this one way or another, and they’re not going to let him leave the kitchen until they do. 

“Michael,” Sara starts, and he shifts his gaze to her, she has her arms crossed over her chest too. He feels like a little kid about to be scolded by his parents. “You can’t keep carrying on like you’re okay. We just got you back, I don’t want to lose you again in a whole other way.”

“You’re not gonna-” 

“No, no. Let me finish, okay?” His wife steps forward and places her hands on his arms, looking up at him and taking a deep breath. Michael nods and places his coffee cup down beside him. “I can’t even begin to imagine what you went through while you were gone, and if I could I’d take all that pain away from you I would. I’d do anything to erase the past seven years, for both of us.” A part of Michael thinks he deserves to live with this pain, after all, he was the one that left his family behind. He put them through the trauma of a funeral, and seven years of grieving. His death basically ruined his brother’s life, and it’s only now that he’s alive again that Lincoln’s starting to get back on the right track. “What happened... It’s horrible, and it’s unfair that you felt like you had no other choice than to do what Poseidon told you. I just think that if you live like this, if you don’t deal with what happened, then he’s still got this hold over you. Over all of us.” 

Michael understands what she’s trying to say, and he knows that she’s right. He just doesn’t know how to be truly vulnerable anymore. For the past seven years, vulnerability was a target on the back. In prisons with some of the worst criminals in the world, vulnerability had put him in a dangerous position. He’d learned to build walls around himself, and now he was home and safe, he had to learn that it was okay to let those walls fall down. It’s not just himself that he’s hurting if he doesn’t.

“Okay..” Michael whispers, reaching up for a moment to run his thumb along Sara’s cheek. “Okay, I’ll talk to someone.” Then he looks towards his brother, wrapping an arm around his wife’s shoulders and pulling her into a hug. “But I want us all to talk to someone. Not just me, okay? We all have unresolved stuff to deal with. This could be good for all of us.” He’s sure that Lincoln will refuse. If there’s anyone more stubborn than Michael, it’s his big brother. 

“Fine by me,” Lincoln says with a shrug, pushing himself off the counter and grabbing his coffee. “We can all cry about our problems then come back here and hug it out. Maybe braid each other’s hair too and watch The Notebook too.” He walks to the back door and slides it open to step out onto the back porch. Michael chuckles at his nonchalant response, and not that he didn’t know it before, but he’s sure his older brother would do anything to see Michael happy. “And you’re eating three square meals a day, I don’t care if it’s freaking brown rice and bread. No more coffee and toast every day.” Then Lincoln steps out onto the porch and leaves the couple alone in the kitchen. 

Sara pulls away from the hug but keeps her arms wrapped around Michael’s waist, looking up at him with a soft smile. “I love you.” She says, leaning up to press a delicate kiss to her husband’s lips. Michael wants to get better, for his family’s sake. For himself too. Poseidon is long gone, he’ll never step foot out of prison again, but he has something to prove to him. He tried to take everything from him, down to his name. Michael fought his way back home, took his life back. Now it’s time to truly start living again, and he can’t do that until he deals with everything he’s been through. 

“I love you too.” He smiles back and pushes a strand of her auburn hair behind her ear. “I don’t deserve you, you know?” 

“Shut up.” She replies with an embarrassed chuckle, smoothing down his shirt collar. 

“No, I mean it. You could’ve run a million miles in the other direction a long time ago, God knows I wouldn’t have blamed you.” Michael looks over her face, taking in every tiny detail, counting every freckle, and committing them to memory. It wasn’t like their relationship had gotten off to the smoothest start, nor had it had a happy middle. He just hoped that there was a happy end. 

Sara gazes up at him, and Michael loses himself in her. “Yeah, well… Once you help a guy escape prison, disappear to South America with him, die a couple of times, and have a kid, you’re kinda bonded for life, whether you like it or not.” 

“I guess so. It’s a good job that you're kinda cute, then.” 

“Okay,” She laughs again and lets her head fall against his chest for a second. “You’re a charmer, Scofield.” She pulls away, and Michael runs her hand down her arm. “Let’s go sit outside with Lincoln, yeah?”

“Yeah.” They both grab their cups of coffee and walk hand in hand out the porch. They all talk a little more about the future, Michael asks how Lincoln and Sheba are doing, and he’s pleased to hear they’re getting closer and closer each day. After the losses his brother has suffered, he deserves to be happy. Michael’s head feels clearer for the first time in a while. There’s a long way to go yet, and a lot of healing to be done for all of them, but a weight’s been lifted off of his shoulders this morning. The sun shines down and illuminates the garden as they chat and drink coffee, when Lincoln and Sara get into a conversation, Michael’s happy to sit and watch them talk. It’s these moments he’s missed more than anything, these moments that he lives for. These are the moments that Poseidon or the last seven years can never take away from him.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you all like the next installation in my Paper Cranes series. I went a little deeper with this one, really wanted to get into Michael's trauma. I just felt like we really need to see a more vulnerable side of him, and really let him deal with everything he's been through. I'm a little nervous about this one, not gonna lie. I wanted Michael to be truly vulnerable and a little bit broken, without him being too out of character? Anyway, hope you enjoy!


End file.
